PM:345:respawn:/path/to/your/program
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  telinit q
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1. You are lazy (and if you are a programmer, you probably are)
2. You are running on *nix
3. The restart does not have to be immediate
4. You don't need to have logic to diagnose chronic/constant failures

There are many existing applications, including some written in Perl, that monitor processes. They range from very simple to very sophisticated (and complex). Some of them have options to restart or take other actions if processes are gone or not responding. Some of them keep logs and produce helpful reports. I suggest you investigate some of the existing applications before writing your own. You can google for "process monitor" or "network management system" to get some leads on what is available.

There are many ways that we can achieve this. If you are using unix system, I hope the following 2 ways will you

use strict;
use warnings;

my $CMD = '/home/blah/my_process';
my $SLEEP_TIME = 1; # check to see if it is running every 5 seconds

while(1)
{
my @pid_array = `ps -ef | grep /home/blah/my_process`;

my $pid_count = scalar(@pid_array);

if ($pid_count == 1)  {
# It isn't running, that 1 is for grep. more than one tells you the pr
+ocess is alive.

system "$CMD"; # run it
}
elsif ($pid_count > 2)  {
# There is more than one instance running.
# Do appropriate stuff
    print "many instances are running";
}

sleep $SLEEP_TIME;
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The above code won't work all the time, but, you can adopt some changes and use the above to find a process is running or not

This is another way. Try the below code

use strict;
use warnings;

if (kill (0, pid))  {
  print "process alive";
}
else  {
  print "process died";
}
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To know about kill function, try google it.

FYI...it's windows system, running on windows server 2003...thanks
I love it when a program comes together - jdhannibal